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September 11, 2001
By Janelle Holden When Kevin Des Planques drove through the San Luis Valley two years ago, he didn’t expect to see something that would make the Smithsonian Institute sit up and take notice. From U.S. Highway 160 near the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, Des Planques, a teacher at the San Juan Basin Technical School east of Cortez, could see an archaeological site that he had discovered in 1985, and it had changed. "I knew right away that I needed to investigate it," Des Planques explained, because the sand over the site had eroded away, increasing it "10-fold" since he had last seen it. After obtaining permission from the Nature Conservancy, which owns the Medano-Zapata ranch where the site is located, Des Planques went to investigate. "As soon as I stepped into the site, I found two artifacts that dated somewhere between 7,500 to 9,000 years ago. "Then I continued to look in the site and I ended up finding a total of 20 projectile points or fragments, and pretty much every one of them fit the mold of a Paleo-Indian artifact." Des Planques teaches construction technology, but is an amateur archaeologist who took an interest in the subject while studying at Adams State College in Alamosa. When he returned from his trip two years ago, he contacted the Smithsonian, and Bruce Bradley, a local archaeologist. Bradley was one of 50 people who helped with the excavation of the Sierra Vista site over Labor Day weekend, explained Pegi Jodry, a research archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History who is heading up the project. "This is the first site of this time period in the San Luis Valley ever excavated," said Jodry. "I think it will give us a more definitive picture as to what is happening in the San Luis Valley in this time period between 8,500 and 8,000 years ago, which we know almost nothing about." The site is an ancient hunter-gatherer camp from the Archaic period, 6000 to 3000 B.C. The people who used the camp traveled from northern New Mexico to the meadows of southern Colorado to hunt. "I think they were pretty well-represented here at that time period, coming north following up the Rio Grande River up into these beautiful wet meadows that we have here," said Jodry. The projectile points that Des Planques found in the site and donated to the Smithsonian are a type of Archaic arrowhead thrown at animals with an atl-atl. "What it looks like is that there’s a camp here, and there’s no direct evidence of the kill being right at this location at this time, not in what we’ve seen so far," said Jodry. The hunter-gatherers brought with them obsidian from the Jemez mountains in northern New Mexico. They combined it with material from the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado to make points to kill the animals they hunted. They also used stones to grind plants. Funded by the National Park Service in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution and the Friends of the Dunes, the project has been an excellent collaboration, Jodry said. "One thing that we’re really pleased about is we’ve had a lot of cooperation between local, avocational archaeologists in the valley — which Kevin was at the time he found the site — and professional archaeologists working together to learn about the past," said Jodry, who explained that over 80 percent of the Paleo-Indian sites in Colorado have been found by amateur archaeologists. Jodry said work will continue next year to find material the archaeologists can date. "Now that we’ve identified the intact portion of this particular campsite, what we’re hoping to do is come back next year and find a campfire, to where we can directly date this material," said Jodry. "One of the things that we learned is that there is a buried soil that is associated with this hunter-gatherer material of 8,000 years ago. So there is more of the site left intact, which we were happy to hear." |
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